The Ancient Agora
landmark

The Ancient Agora

Athens, Greece

Down the slope from you is the Ancient Agora, and almost all of it is ankle-high — foundations, cut stone, the outlines of rooms where the walls used to be.

Down the slope from you is the Ancient Agora, and almost all of it is ankle-high — foundations, cut stone, the outlines of rooms where the walls used to be. Except for one long two-storey building with a colonnade running its whole length, which is looking suspiciously well for its age.

It should. That building went up in the nineteen fifties. It's a full-scale reconstruction of a second-century shopping arcade, put back on the original foundations by American archaeologists with money from John D Rockefeller Junior. Athens let someone put up a brand new ancient building in the middle of the real ruins, then filled it with the genuine finds.

You'll hear trains through this. The electric railway to Piraeus was driven along the northern edge of the site in the eighteen nineties, years before anybody excavated it, and it's still running. Athens laid a commuter line across the birthplace of democracy and left it there.

This is the Agora, and it was the working floor of the city. Not a t

emple district — the place where Athens did its admin. Courts, council house, records office, market, and the place every citizen loitered. The Greek word for it is agora, which is also the root of agoraphobia — a condition that means, translated strictly, fear of this exact square.

It's also where they invented a procedure that has no modern equivalent, and I have looked.

Once a year, the assem

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Quick Facts

  • The Stoa of Attalos is a 1950s full-scale reconstruction built on the original foundations by the American School with money from John D. Rockefeller Jr.
  • The electric railway to Piraeus was driven along the northern edge of the Agora in the 1890s, before the site was excavated, and still runs through it.
  • 'Agora' is the root of the word 'agoraphobia'.
  • Ostracism required 6,000 votes to count; the man named most often left Athens for ten years with no trial and no charge, keeping his property and citizenship.
  • In the 1930s an archaeologist emptied a well on the Acropolis north slope and found about 190 ostraka, every one naming Themistocles, all unused — Broneer read the handwriting as roughly fourteen hands, though later scholarship disputes the count.
  • Themistocles talked Athens out of splitting a silver strike and into building 200 warships, which beat the Persian fleet at Salamis — and was exiled anyway, dying in Persia as a wealthy Persian official with a governorship and three cities.
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